


Standard Deviation

by TheColorBlue



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 12:03:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1778371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every morning, he knows he is not, anymore, that kid from Brooklyn.<br/>He knows it because he’ll run by Sam Wilson thirty times in thirty minutes around the National Mall, it’s repetition on the clock:<br/>On your left.<br/>On your left.<br/>On your—<br/>Anyway, it’s not exactly normal, Steve’s aware of that on some level. </p><p>Writing this fic was 85% the direct consequence of reading <a href="http://septembriseur.tumblr.com/post/88581583654/so-ever-since-i-saw-that-post-about-the-super">this post</a> by septembriseur and also her style of fic, and 15% having been fascinated with the film's opening sequence since first seeing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standard Deviation

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty aware that more experimental and blunt styles of writing like the one I use here seem to be generally reserved for Bucky perspective fics and not Steve's. But at the same time, I guess it made sense, to me, to use it for Steve here.

Steve Rogers was always the kid from Brooklyn, until he wasn’t. He’s been back to Brooklyn. It really isn’t the same, nowadays. It’s not that he’s missing the “good old days” like Sam suggested, because they weren’t exactly. They weren’t better, but at least it would have been home, and the battles being fought would have been familiar ones.

-

Every morning, he knows he is not, anymore, the kid from Brooklyn.

Not that skin.

Not those bones.

He’s acclimated to his own body, his body of now, that’s not the problem. He knows his own fingertips, the strength of his muscles. He knows the breath in his own lungs, and how he doesn’t have to struggle to breathe anymore, and knowing the alignment of his spine, and the balance of his body. It’s true that even still when he looks into a mirror he’s a bit surprised by what he sees, but that would have been true back in the old days, too. He’s not the kind of guy who looks into mirrors except to shave and make sure his hair’s not sticking up funny. He’s not looking into a mirror for some form of identification.

Every morning, he knows he is not, anymore, that kid from Brooklyn.

He knows it because he’ll run by Sam Wilson thirty times in thirty minutes around the National Mall, it’s repetition on the clock:

On your left.

On your left.

On your—

Anyway, it’s not exactly normal, Steve’s aware of that on some level. Every time he says it, _on your left_ , it’s the highlight of some kind of anomaly. Maybe if he says it enough times, it’ll become not that. It’ll become _normal_.

He’s weirdly glad when Sam jokes with him about it. _You should be ashamed of yourself, you should take another lap_.

Steve flirts back, his face going into what he knows are goofy smiles, because it’s normal now.

Normal, now.

Normal?

More normal that it used to be, when using the term “normal” was to deny the possibility of your being sexually deviant.

He is normal, now

—?

-

When Hydra tries to capture him the first time, they crowd in an elevator, eleven to one.

This is not normal.

Neither is Steve overpowering them anyway, and then surviving an eighteen-story drop, even taking into account landing on a vibranium shield.

-

It’s not exactly that he minds: being the outlier in most standard situations.

It is something he finds himself thinking about a lot.

He’s just a guy from Brooklyn, he says.

He isn’t.

Not really.

Not in the way he wants to mean it, when he says it, _like that_.

-

When Hydra captures him, and Natasha, and Sam, they bolt Steve to the wall of the truck, and restrain his feet, and his legs. They warn him that if he tries to break out, he’ll be treated to an electric surge, courtesy of the wiring in the restraints. They’ve already tested it on The Asset. If the asset couldn’t get out, than Rogers certainly wasn’t.

Steve doesn’t think about that at first.

He’s still too wound up over having seen Bucky’s face, in a time where he shouldn’t have.

But, eventually, he figures it out.

He figures it out and he thinks: he thinks he’s going to be sick.

Bucky, in something like this.

“He looked right at me and he didn’t even know me.”

The horrifying abnormality of all of this.

If this had been a normal world, an ordinary world: they both should have been dead already. Or old, at least. Old like Peggy has aged. Forgetful in the way that came with age, and not like—

He wonders when it became normal, for anyone: what they did to Bucky.

Whatever they did to Bucky.

This couldn’t be—

-

“It’s what they did,” Bucky says, when they are together again.

He doesn’t say _it was normal_ , but the sound of it is there, in the hollowness of his voice.

Steve puts a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of, and crackers. The soup is freshly made, Steve bought four large cartons of the stuff from a local restaurant.

Chicken noodle soup:

Ordinary.

Safe.

Not ordinary:

The way Bucky doesn’t touch it, at first, something skittering in his eyes from Steve, back to the bowl in front of him.

Steve has to tell him, to order him, to eat.

He watches Bucky as he spoons up the soup mechanically, until all the soup is done.

Steve has to tell Bucky to eat the crackers as well.

Bucky eats the crackers in small bites, like the dry and the salt of them bother him, and Steve has to tell him to stop.

Not ordinary.

Not: normal.

Neither of them are—

-

Steve Rogers was always the kid from Brooklyn, until he wasn’t.

He stopped being _that guy_ the day he agreed to take Dr. Erskine’s serum. He knows it everyday: in the strength of his body, in the quality of his breath, in the way he can run thirty miles in thirty minutes without even getting winded.

But he wants to be.

He wants to be every time he laughs at one of Sam’s jokes,

or tells Natasha that what he wants is a friend,

or when he holds Bucky against him, Bucky’s cheek resting against his chest, slowly breathing, and it is what he wants to be:

two guys from Brooklyn.

But they’re—not.

They’re not really, anymore.

Not in the way—the way that Steve wants to mean it, when he says it:

_like that_


End file.
